Book review: A half-baked chronicle of a celebrated 20th Century historian

Hobsbawm was a lifelong communist, well read in the writings of Marx and Engels and other Marxist theoreticians

This is a biography of Eric Hobsbawm, arguably the most famous historian of the second half of the 20th century, written by another well-known historian. In this sense — a biography by a professional historian of another serious historian — this is a special, if not a unique, kind of book. It deserves to be evaluated by the very high standards of historical scholarship that the two historians set for themselves.

It is, thus, a valid expectation that this biography would be more than a chronicle of Hobsbawm’s long and rich life — he lived well into his 90s and